The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  I was panicking now and set off back the way I’d come at a run. I thought I’d probably lost 30 or 40 minutes and I was really frightened that I was going to miss the cut off at the first check-point. As I surged on, I began to see some of the other trainees in the mist but, as we’d all set off at different times I couldn’t be complacent and I didn’t stop or speak to any of them. I got to the RV which was a small tent and found Benny lying inside in a sleeping bag. I was soaked in sweat and gasping for breath. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Well done, Rusty,’ ticked my name off his list, entered my time and read out the next grid reference. I repeated it back to confirm it to him, then checked my map to see where it was and set off again. Even though I’d made the first RV, there was no certainty that I wasn’t going to fuck up again and I was clearly behind the curve, so there was no time to waste and off I went again.

  This went on all through the day and on into the night. I was cold, wet and exhausted but I kept pushing myself onwards, still fearing that I must just be a little bit ahead of the cut off. I was desperate to pass and I was going to push myself as hard as I could to make sure I did.

  Sometime in the late afternoon, I came across John Mac, sitting in the shelter of some boulders, brewing tea over a hexamine cooker.

  ‘Alright, Rusty, how are you doing mate?’ he asked.

  ‘Bit of a fuck up at the start, mate,’ I told him.

  He held up a mug: ‘Want a brew?’

  ‘No thanks, mate: I need to push on. See you later.’

  ‘See you, Rusty,’ he said, and I carried on.

  I was mildly puzzled by this because he looked fine and I assumed that it was just a classic example of laid-back Johnny Mac. I didn’t see him again during the march and only later discovered that actually he’d turned his ankle over and couldn’t continue.

  As the night wore on I began to realise that I was doing OK and had actually made up the time I lost at the start, but I still didn’t give up. At around the 17-hour point I was faced with a dilemma when I came to a metalled road which crossed my route. Standing nearby was Major B, Officer Commanding Training Wing, and he called me over.

  ‘Show me where you are, Firmin, and where you’re going,’ he asked me in his strong Irish brogue. I took my map out and showed him. I suspect he was checking to see if I’d marked it, which was a big no-no.

  ‘Well done, off you go,’ he said. I didn’t reply, just took off and fled into the distance. I got to the next RV and was given a grid reference for yet another reservoir. By now I felt almost beyond pain. Everything was aching but I just pushed on through it: head down and keep going. I saw a few figures ahead of me and caught up with one of them, a bloke called Mick, a really fit fucker from the Royal Anglian Regiment. We were walking on a rough track now and we carried on together for a bit, chatting occasionally, until we got close to the next RV where we decided to split up before the instructors saw us.

  When I arrived at the RV, the instructor came out and said, ‘OK, well done, this is the end.’

  He didn’t say this was the end of the exercise or that we had passed. Had I failed? I didn’t know. Looking around I could see the support vehicles that would take us back so I realised it was the end of the route, but I had no idea if I’d made the time.

  There was a tea urn in the back of one of the trucks and, after I’d dropped my bergan, I suppose I got four or five cups of tea down my neck and started to feel better. As trainees arrived, we got loaded into the trucks and, when one was reasonably full, they took off back to Hereford. Surprisingly, even after all the effort we had put in, there was still a fair amount of laughing and joking as we headed back to camp.

  We got to Bradbury Lines late in the early hours and I got straight into my normal routine: sort out my feet, sort out my kit, clean my weapon and hand it in. I was too keyed up to sleep and waited for the cookhouse to open where I got myself the world’s biggest breakfast, chatting and joking with the other lads who were back.

  We hung around in the Training Wing basha for a couple of hours, waiting anxiously to be called out on parade. When the time came we were lined up in three ranks outside the Training Wing offices just like on the first day, although now there were very many fewer of us. Major B made a short speech and then handed over to Lofty, who read out the list of those who had passed. I was delighted to hear my name but sadly, Johnny Mac’s injury meant that he hadn’t got through. In fact he was already down at the medical centre getting patched up. Lofty made the point that everyone there had given it everything, and even those who’d failed could go back to their units with their heads held high and he was quite right. At least they’d had the balls to give it a go and there was no shame in failure. Those who had been injured during test week were given the opportunity to go on what was called ‘Goon Troop’ where they would do odd-jobs around camp whilst focusing on getting fit for the next selection in winter 1978. Meanwhile, for those who’d passed, we had a weekend of partying ahead before cracking on with the next stage: continuation training.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CONTINUATION

  For the first week of continuation training the focus was on learning to recognise and use a range of foreign weapons systems that we might come across when operating overseas. This included the various different types of Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns, RPG rocket launchers, Soviet-style fragmentation grenades and a range of other kit from around the world that we might meet.

  It kicked off with familiarisation with the weapons and their characteristics, then moved on to stripping, cleaning and assembling them, and finally off to the ranges to shoot with them, which was all good fun. This was followed by a couple of days learning the very basics of close quarter battle (CQB) shooting with pistols. The pressure was off, to some extent, because part of this was us filling in time while the Ruperts* who had got through selection were put through ‘officers week’. This was a little extra bit of selection they did to ensure that they could operate and think when tired and under pressure and most of the training wing staff were focused on that.

  *Ruperts = officers

  Having said that, I continued to give everything 100 per cent. Actually, this kind of thing was what I enjoyed. I’d been shooting since I was a kid, albeit with an old Webley air-pistol back then, and I’d never lost my enthusiasm for it. Even so, I refused to take anything for granted and maintained my concentration: the instructors were still watching us like hawks throughout, not so much to fail us but to nip any faults in the bud before they became ingrained.

  Once the Ruperts had rejoined us – and there were a few less of them now – we continued with training in various SAS skills but the emphasis now was on building up for the jungle training course in Belize, Central America, which was the next big event.

  We flew out to Belize on the regular RAF trooping flight from Brize Norton which left first thing on a Wednesday morning across the Atlantic, with a refuelling stop in Washington DC, before continuing on down to Belize itself.

  If you’ve never been to Belize, it’s a small country about the size of Wales which sits on the east coast of the Central American isthmus, to the south of the Yucatan peninsula, which is part of Mexico, and east of the Peten province of Guatemala. Naturally, this being Latin America, both Mexico and especially Guatemala claimed that it was actually part of their territory (in fact Honduras did as well, although it has no land borders with Belize) but at the time I first went there, it was a self-governing British colony heading towards independence in 1980. In the 1970s and 80s, Britain kept an infantry battlegroup out there, together with a flight of RAF Harriers and some other bits and pieces as part of an agreement to support the Belize government and protect them from the Guatemalans. Periodically, 22 SAS also sent a troop or so out there to do a combination of jungle training and border patrolling, as well as running the jungle phase of continuation training which took place every six months.

  We arrived at Belize airport early on the Wednesday afternoon and
the first thing that hits you is the heat, closely followed by the humidity which is above 90 per cent almost all through the year. After that comes the rich, loamy smell of the jungle which is all around. The southern half of Belize is mostly hilly jungle; the northern half of the country is flatter, lower-lying scrubland, swamp and jungle, and Belize City and its suburbs like Ladyville, where the airport is, are at roughly the halfway point.

  At the airport, all the new arrivals were met by buses and driven a couple of miles around the perimeter to Airport Camp (APC), the headquarters of British Forces Belize. Back then it was a classic British tropical military base. Neat rows of corrugated iron Nissen huts and single-storey brick buildings, carefully mown lawns, colourful flower beds and paved roads, in contrast to the shanty towns where a lot of the locals live.

  At APC we were taken to a couple of anonymous-looking Nissen huts to be issued our kit and equipment. This didn’t take long: apart from an Armalite AR-15 rifle with magazines and cleaning kit, the bulk of it consisted of 14 days’ worth of rations. Back then, British Army ‘compo’ field rations came in a little cardboard box designed to feed one man all the calories he needed for 24 hours. You got a small bag of tea, coffee, milk powder and other sundries; a sachet of soup; some packets of biscuits; a chocolate bar; some boiled sweets; then there were the main meals, which were in tin cans. The point about this is that if we’d taken all of it, we wouldn’t have had room in our bergans for anything else, so the first job was to bin about half of it.

  With our kit sorted out, we were flown out of APC in helicopters to the training area way out in the jungle. The first task was to re-establish the base camp which had last been used by the SAS selection course six months earlier. The key thing for each of us was to set up our own individual bed-space, which would consist of an A-frame pole bed, covered by a nylon kip sheet to keep the rain off. The instructors quickly demonstrated how to do this and we set about the task. If you don’t like snakes and creepy-crawlies, then you had better forget about spending time in the jungle because they’re everywhere.

  We were told to clear the leaf litter from round our beds so that the big, biting ants would tend to stay away, but there was no shortage of other nasties lurking around. These included sandflies, which go for your ankles and lower legs, giving incredibly itchy bites; scorpions which scuttle into your kit and hide there, ready to give you a potentially fatal sting; leeches which fasten on to bare skin and suck your blood; great big wasps; tarantulas which tend to look a lot nastier than they actually are; botflies which lay eggs under your skin and hatch out into great big maggots which chew tunnels through your flesh; mosquitoes which spend the whole night trying to bite you and give you malaria.

  But the most dangerous animals we were likely to encounter were not the insects and creepy-crawlies, or even the jaguars which supposedly roamed the area, although I never saw one, but the fer-de-lance snake. These buggers are not just highly poisonous, being equipped with a neuro-toxic venom which will seriously fuck you up, even if you survive it, but they’re aggressive too. Most snakes do a runner when you get too close rather than take on a fully grown human, but the fer-de-lance, known locally as the ‘Tommy-Goff,’ will often enough defend its territory and will keep on biting until you’re down. The problem is that their hunting technique is based on hiding in leaf litter until their prey gets close enough to strike, so they don’t move until you’re right on top of them. If you’re not careful, you’re soon in a world of hurt.

  The second major issue was the weather. We arrived in Belize at the height of the wet season. Regular as clockwork, every day, it would piss down with rain from sometime in the mid-afternoon until the early hours of the morning. I don’t just mean a little bit of rain: it hammered down with thunder and lightning to accompany it. When it wasn’t raining, the heat and humidity were intense, which meant that we would always be soaking wet during the day, either from our own sweat or from the rain. We don’t wear waterproofs in a tactical environment: the only way to combat this was to be meticulously careful about how we looked after our kit. It was crucial that we kept the contents of our bergans dry, so everything inside was stored in waterproof bags which we painstakingly sealed every time we used them. The rule was to keep a dry set of clothing which we could change into at night when we were basha’d up, then change back into the wet gear the next morning before stand to. This is seriously character building. Imagine that every morning for several weeks, you wake up in your dry kit in your comfortable pole bed, and then have to carefully strip off dry shirt, pants, trousers and socks, and then pull on cold, wet and – eventually – stinking working clothes. It’s never a good way to start the day, although it prevents absolute misery later on.

  The jungle phase, as it’s called, is one of the three major elements of the course and, like selection itself and the later combat survival phase, it’s a pass/ fail test. In the first three weeks we would be learning the skills, carefully taught by the instructors, but in the fourth week we would face a difficult test exercise and, if you didn’t reach the standard, you were going back to your unit. We all knew this and, as before on selection, I was determined to give it all I had.

  We started off with navigation. This is completely different in the jungle to what it’s like in, for example, the Brecon Beacons. Partly this is because a lot of the time you have very little visibility because of the vegetation. On top of a bare-arse hill in the Beacons, you can see maybe 20 or 30 miles on a good day, and pick out all sorts of landmarks which you just march towards but in the jungle visibility is sometimes no more than five or ten yards which makes it all a bit more difficult. Secondly, the maps are very different. Because the ground is covered by jungle, most of the maps show the general outline of the ground but little more, so we needed to develop the ability to move with a map and compass, without relying on landmarks.

  The Belizean jungle is mostly ‘primary jungle’, meaning that it has never been cultivated and is pretty much in its primeval state but, because Belize is hit by major hurricanes coming in off the Gulf of Mexico from time to time, the vegetation does get flattened, allowing new growth to appear. This creates a ‘dirty’ jungle: the trees aren’t normally as high as they can be in south-east Asia and other areas we train and operate in, more light gets through to the jungle floor, meaning there are more bushes and undergrowth down there, and there are more fallen trees and branches than you find in a lot of jungle areas.

  This was what we focused on during the first week: basic navigation and jungle movement. After lessons from the instructors, we were formed into small groups for navigation exercises around the base camp area, taking it in turns to lead the group but constantly checking our maps and compasses under the hawk-like gaze of the DS, while we fulfilled various pre-arranged tasks.

  When they decided we’d got the hang of that, they began to introduce a tactical element to it as we moved into the second week. This meant learning about tactical patrolling, sometimes moving as little as 500 yards in a day to avoid detection, ambush drills and counter-ambush drills. We soon learned to avoid tracks through the jungle completely. Whether they’re made by people or animals, they have a magnetic attraction for anyone or anything travelling through the jungle and are an obvious site for an ambush, so why tempt fate?

  It was while we were doing this that we began to come into contact with a bush the Belizeans call a ‘Wait-a-While’ and British squaddies generally refer to as the ‘Bastard Tree’. This was covered in sharp thorns that hook into your skin and clothes and stop any further movement. What you have to do is stop, grab the branch and move carefully backwards whilst the thorns come out of your skin and clothes, then move carefully round it. You can’t fight the jungle but some tried. I was told that a few on the course just tried to force their way through. It doesn’t work: the thorns break off in your flesh and then fester in jungle conditions. If you lose your temper and get aggressive, you lose focus and concentration on what you’re supposed to be doing. Y
ou just have to live with it: in the jungle, mossies, sand-flies and ants will bite you and leeches will attach themselves to you. That’s how it rolls.

  I was in a patrol with George F, who was a Marine Commando, Phil Singleton, who was REME, and an officer from the Guards whose name I can’t remember, mostly because he failed the course and it was a long time ago. Our instructor was Benny, who I’d also had on selection: very switched on and a really good instructor with a wealth of medical knowledge on the side from his role as a patrol medic.

  Once we’d mastered the basics of tactical movement, we began to put it together with live firing CQB exercises set up on jungle lanes with pop-up targets. This was really demanding stuff, both physically and mentally as you need to maintain absolute concentration, but at the same time it was good fun and I really enjoyed it. This was followed by some basic tracking lessons, teaching us how to read the spoor left by humans and animals. Obviously there are no showers in the jungle, and spending every day slopping around in mud in wet kit your body starts to get a bit ripe, but there was water in abundance – provided you used purification tablets – and we could keep ourselves well hydrated and do a limited wash when necessary. By now I had a decent growth of beard – nobody bothers to shave in the jungle and my feeling was that it helped to keep the insects and mossies off my face – and I was feeling pretty good about it all as we moved into the third week. Benny had taught us a lot and we were functioning well together as a team.